I just received an email (from this guy's PR outfit) with the subject line:

President Obama's Attacks on Free Speech Opposed by Most Americans, Zogby/O'Leary Poll Finds

Tell me more!

Here's one of the "questions" asked in the poll, tailor-made for Fox News Channel:

Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd wants the FCC to force good white people in positions of power in the broadcast industry to step down to make room for more African-Americans and gays to fill those positions.  Do you agree or disagree that this presents a threat to free speech?

It's worth noting that this question only elicited 51 percent support.

Are there any other non-existent administration policies that polling outfits should be asking people about?

"Rush the Racist?" is the headline over a commentary written by retired NFL receiver Keenan McCardell on the Washington Post's sports blog, the League--and the question many football fans might ask upon hearing the news that Rush Limbaugh is bidding to become co-owner of the St. Louis Rams.

That's because Limbaugh has a long record of making racist remarks. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed written by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and myself, we documented many instances of Limbaugh's racism, including his admission that he once told a black caller to "take that bone out of your nose," his assertion that "all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson," and his advice to a group with a 90-year commitment to nonviolence: "The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies."

Last year Limbaugh referred to Barack Obama as "the little black man-child." This past January, while discussing Barack Obama with Sean Hannity on Fox, Limbaugh said, "We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president."

So the prospect of Limbaugh owning a team in a league where nearly two-thirds of the players are African-American should be natural media buzz generator. As CBSSports.com's Mike Freeman wrote under the headline "NFL's Greatest Nightmare," "sometimes these column thingies write themselves." (Unfortunately, Freeman's column, also posted on the Washington Post's League blog, repeated an alleged Limbaugh quote about the merits of slavery that is unverified.)

Perhaps Limbaugh’s most notable remark in the St. Louis context was his 1994 response to learning from a caller to his show that St. Louis would be extending a light rail system into East St. Louis--a community of some 40,000 residents, almost all of whom are black. Said Rush (The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, New Press, 1995): "They got a light rail system to East St. Louis where nobody goes?"

Reporters might ask East St. Louis residents what they think about the prospect of Rush Limbaugh owning their local football team.

William Bennett at the Values Voter Summit (AlterNet, 9/22/09):

I don't know why more of the African American leadership doesn't talk about Frederick Douglass.... Probably because of his deep devotion to Lincoln, and his deep devotion to this country.

Frederick Douglass at the dedication of the Freedman's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (4/14/1876):

It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought and in his prejudices, he was a white man.

He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration.

Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report (Fall/09) is calling attention to Pacifica Radio network member station KPFK for airing the Spanish-English show La Causa's "naked anti-Semitism."

According to the SPLC, the weekly program's hosts, Augustín Cebada and Rafael Tlaloc, "are more than just passive enablers of anti-Semitic rhetoric:

They actively promote conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media and world governments, referring to Ponzi scheme crook Bernie Madoff as "that Jewish scam artist." Tlaloc said he felt no sympathy for Madoff's victims, many of whom were Jewish, because they were "shylocks and shysters."...

La Causa is tightly linked to La Voz de Aztlán, a rabidly anti-Semitic website based in Whittier, California. La Voz de Aztlán has been identified as a hate website by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

La Causa hosts and callers often reference La Voz de Aztlán as a credible source of information, and La Voz de Aztlán webmaster Hector Carreon has been interviewed on La Causa as a legitimate political analyst. Although a recording of that 2007 interview is no longer available in the KPFK online archives, Carreon boasts about an ongoing collaboration with La Causa on the La Voz de Aztlán website.

This would all be deplorable enough content from any outlet, but the SPLC tells us the 50-year-old KPFK not only is "the most powerful public radio station in the Western United States, according to its website," but also has a mission statement that aspires to "a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors."

Former President Jimmy Carter's statement (NBC, 9/15/09)  that "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," has generated widespread discussion in the corporate media. But few of the many analyses of Carter's remarks give you much of a sense of why one might think that many of Obama's foes are motivated by racism.

No one can look into another person's heart, of course. But many of Obama's most prominent critics have talked enough about the president and race to provide plenty of evidence about where they're coming from.  And no one has been more revealing of their inner demons than Rush Limbaugh; who can forget this classic too-much-information rant?

We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.

Strikingly, the same day Carter made his supposedly controversial comments about racism and Obama critics, Limbaugh (9/15/09) was engaged in all-out race-baiting over a schoolbus fight that was initially reported as a racial incident:

It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on," and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

If that's not an expression of a racial animus, what would qualify?  Why is it more controversial to criticize people who issue hateful rants like this than it is to make them in the first place?

"It is difficult to overstate President Obama's unpopularity in most of Louisiana," writes Campbell Robertson in a front-page New York Times article  (9/11/09). Yet Robertson managed to pull it off.

Robertson continues: "He lost handily to Senator John McCain here, picking up only 14 percent of the white vote. (The state is roughly two-thirds white.)" Fourteen percent? Wow, that is unpopular! But given that black and other non-white people have been able to vote in Louisiana for several decades now, wouldn't it make sense to give the actual share of the vote Obama received? That would be 40 percent, which is a pretty disappointing electoral result, but Obama did worse in six other states--and McCain did as bad or worse in 12 states. Yet it would be pretty easy, I would think, to overstate McCain's unpopularity in, say, Maine.

The problem here is treating white opinion as representative of the opinions of the public at large. ("In Louisiana, Tainted Senator Rides Anti-Obama Sentiment" is the print headline.) It's a subtler form of the crude analysis Chris Matthews used to do when Obama was running for the Democratic nomination: "How's he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community?"

The Times piece is mainly about the re-election prospects of Sen. David Vitter, but it takes time out for a look back at a recent special election race for a Louisiana State Senate seat. The lone Republican in the three-way race bashed his opponents with a flier--which accompanies the story as a graphic--featuring a smiling hippie and the text, "You might be a liberal if you...voted for Barack Obama." But the punchline of the story is that one of the Democrats beat the Republican in the runoff election, 54 percent to 46 percent, which would seem to undercut the story's contention that Obama is to Louisiana voters as garlic is to vampires. But the next line in Robertson's story is, "So given Louisiana's increasingly reddish hue, the prevailing political wisdom is that a real threat to Mr. Vitter would come from his right." Illustrating the old journalism adage: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Intern Katy Kelleher at the Jezebel.com blog (9/9/09) has made a worthy attempt at "unpacking all the different levels of sexism and racism that are operating subtly behind the scenes" in recent coverage of professional women's tennis.

On the new stardom of relatively diminutive and white Melanie Oudin, Kelleher remarks that "her accomplishments are definitely praiseworthy, but there is something off about the way she is being celebrated":

She has been called the "darling" of the U.S. Open, America's "sweetheart," a "pint-sized, freckled-faced blonde from Georgia," the "tiny little savior of women's tennis," everything it seems, save tennis' "Great White Hope" (although given the media coverage of Oudin's win, it would probably be more like the "little, teeny-tiny, super cute White Hope").

Especially problematic was this article from the Daily Beast, which quoted ESPN sportscaster Michelle Beadle comparing Oudin to the Williams sisters. "From Day 1, I've never heard the Williams sisters referred to as sweethearts," she said, which prompted Jez commenter sympathyforthebasementcat to remark:

Yes, there's just something different about them. Americans just aren't quite to fully relate to them. They just don't seem like the type of girls that would live next door. Hmmm, what could it be?

Explaining how "every sportscaster reporting on Oudin feels the need to comment on how pretty she is" and "All-American," seems to "fail to recognize the racism that lurks behind these terms," Kelleher also looks at a New York Times column in which George Vecsey "says, unlike the Williams sisters, Oudin has fought her way up from the bottom": "The crowd always loves upsets, which is one reason Venus Williams and Serena Williams are not universally loved at the Open."

Kelleher's response is to quote yet another sharp-witted Jezebel commenter:

What a shame the Williams sisters don't have a rags-to-riches backstory. You know, like growing up in a poor neighborhood and being coached by a father who had zero experience of their sport, and fighting their way to success against the odds. Yep, that would have made a great story and endeared them to the public, right?

Printing a letter to the editor from Leila McDowell (8/26/09), the New York Times has "Another Look at Obama's Speech to the NAACP"--from the group's on vice president of communications.

McDowell starts with the fact that the "Times distinguished itself from most major media by virtually ignoring the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, which was started in New York"--and then, "when the Times finally did send a reporter...the resulting article ("Obama Gives Fiery Address at NAACP," July 17) focused on personal responsibility," even though "that was the least prominent part of Mr. Obama's speech":

What was noteworthy was his discussion of racial disparities, the barriers facing African-Americans and the policies to redress social gaps.

This is a theme President Obama has rarely spoken about with such depth.

Urging personal responsibility in our communities is as traditional as shouting "Amen!" to the preacher's sermon in black churches and civic organizations.

What is new is the president's forceful articulation of the disparities we fight every day. Personal responsibility will not remove the barriers that a legacy of racism and exclusion has left for millions of African-Americans.

"The familiar refrain of personal responsibility," though "an important issue... articulated by black preachers long before Mr. Obama," is, McDowell writes, "an old story and standard fare." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Dedrick Muhammad on Obama's NAACP Speech and 'Tough Love'" (7/31/09).

Eva Paterson (Huffington Post, 8/28/09),  president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, has a response to Glenn Beck's assertion that "I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts" after having been "smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show."

Being "the person who first hired Van Jones," Paterson finds herself "in a unique position to know the truth." And falling squarely in the fabulously unsurprising category is that "the truth is: Beck is fabricating his facts":

For instance: several times on his show, Beck has said or implied that Van went to prison for taking part in the Rodney King riots....

This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week after the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police...stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people--including all the legal monitors.

The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).

So the unwarranted arrest at a peaceful march--for which the charges were dropped and for which Van was financially compensated--is the sole basis for the smear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal.

Paterson reminds you that "you don't have to take my word for it," since "arrests and convictions are all a matter of public record." And of course, FAIR followers know all too well that "Beck is at best relying on Internet rumors or even inventing claims to boost his ratings."

Read a recent article from FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

The Hispanic/Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition, along with the National Hispanic Media Coalition (8/11/09), "applauds" the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for being "the first elected body to take a stand against hate speech in media" by having

approved unanimously a resolution urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to conduct a comprehensive investigation on hate speech in media, allowing public participation via public hearings, and for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to update its 1993 report the "Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes."

The Supervisors responded to grassroots activists in the Bay Area who have organized to call attention to the alarming increase of patently false and hateful language in media. For the last three years, the Hispanic/Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition SF has organized annual protests held at Clear Channel Communications.

Clear Channel is specifically "selected as the protest site due to the corporation's record of promoting some of the most virulent purveyors of hate and intolerance, including Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, who denigrate communities, groups and individuals."

Read the resolution on the City of San Francisco's website.

Also check out the profiles of Savage, Beck and other media hatemongers on FAIR's Smearcasting.com site--and see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Hate Speech, Media Activism and the First Amendment: Putting a Spotlight on Dehumanizing Language" (5/09) by Candice O'Grady.

News Corpse blogger Mark Howard (8/10/09) calls the fact that "industry sources are reporting that Don Imus is in talks with the Fox Business Network to simulcast his Imus in the Morning radio program" a "de facto admission by FBN that they have failed to attract an audience capable of sustaining the network."

Howard sees further evidence of the network's struggles in that "they are approaching their second anniversary and still do not permit Nielsen to publish their ratings." And their rumored acquisition bodes ill for whatever credibility may remain:

Acquiring Imus would be a desperation play for eyeballs. While Imus suffered a devastating blow as a result of his "nappy-headed hos" remarks, losing his top-rated radio program and the MSNBC simulcast, he still has a smaller but significant fan base. However, for a business network to hand over the prime morning hours as the stock market opens to a shock jock with no business credibility tells you that they no longer consider business news their mission. They are grasping for any viewers they can round up.

"Remember," Howard urges, "this is the network that interviewed New York's Naked Cowboy on their first day of broadcasting. They haven’t come very far since then, have they?"

In his latest "Dispatch from the Bolivarian Revolution", blogger Eric Wingerter (BoRev.net, 7/18/09) asks, "Man oh man, how bad does AP reporting have to get before a group of Latin American studies professors from top U.S. universities decides they need to take out a FULL-PAGE AD in the Columbia Journalism Review to respond?"

His answer is "Bad bad"--as illustrated in the ad's text:

The Associated Press has breached basic journalistic principles with these false reports:

[Hugo] Chávez initially suggested the synagogue attack might have been carried out by Jews eager to portray his government as anti-Semitic.

—AP February 8, 2009

Only five months after urging world leaders to back their armed struggle, he [Chávez] said that armed guerrilla movements are "history."

—AP June 10, 2008

THESE STATEMENTS ARE FALSE, and on both occasions, the AP has admitted that they are false.

Saying that Chávez "never called on anyone to support the armed struggle of the FARC—rather, he had called on the FARC to abandon armed struggle," the ad goes on to explain how, "far from blaming Jews from an attack on a synagogue, he denounced the attack as anti-Semitic and took prompt action to find and arrest the attackers."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Corrupt Data: Taking On the Claim that Chávez Is On the Take" (11–12/06) by Gregory Wilpert.

Also listen to letter signatory NYU history professor Greg Grandin on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup" (7/3/09).

As news comes of "yet another horrific mass shooting by yet another disaffected man armed with ammo and a deep hatred of women"--this time "killing three women and injuring nine more" at a Pennsylvania health club--Jennifer Pozner (Women In Media & News, 8/5/09) notices that "the gunman's stated intention to target only women is eerily similar to the Montreal Massacre of 1989, in which a man opened fire on students after screaming: 'You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists'":

Perhaps it takes this level of hit-us-over-the-head bluntness for media to notice that a mass murder is also a hate crime, when the victims of that crime are solely women. In contrast to many other shootings in which similar motivations have gone unreported over the past two decades, the Associated Press (and several other news outlets picking up [their] story) have chosen to discuss the extremely relevant role of misogyny as the root cause of the bloody tragedy in Collier County.

According to the Editor & Publisher blog, [Pennsylvania shooter George] Sodini’s website also contained slams against "the liberal media," Obama, the election of "The Black Man," and jokes about black men and white women. E&P notes that the AP and other outlets have omitted these details. Had Sodini aimed his guns specifically and only at people of color, ignoring information about his bigotry would not only be racist, it would also deprive the public of a full understanding of the nature of his crime. But while his racist webpages certainly add a fuller picture to this disturbed killer's mindset, in this case the AP discussed the part of the website most relevant to the crime: Sodini's anger at being sexually rejected, his deep-seated resentment toward women and his stated plans to kill women.

Calling this "an important step forward in media understanding of and coverage of this sort of crime," Pozner is glad that "finally, a gender-based hate crime is being reported (at least by the AP, at least for now) within the context of the killer’s actual anti-woman agenda." However, "if the press’s previous track record is any indicator, Sodini’s misogyny could potentially fall out of the frame of follow-up reporting."

Reporting for Associated Press (7/3/09), David Bauder has an update on CNN's insistence on "standing behind" Lou Dobbs, who has "become a publicity nightmare for CNN, embarrassed his boss and...on top of all that, his ratings are slipping."

Bauder asks outright: "How does Lou Dobbs keep his job" while plugging the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama "wasn't born in the United States despite convincing evidence to the contrary"?

Dobbs' work has been so unpopular that even Ann Coulter has criticized him.

Dobbs has acknowledged that he believes Obama was born in Hawaii. But he gives airtime to disbelievers, and has said the president should try to put questions fully to rest by releasing a long version of his birth certificate. He's twice done stories on his show after the public leak of a memo from CNN U.S. president Jon Klein saying that "it seems this story is dead."

To be clear, "Klein said those stories were OK because they were about the controversy and weren't actually questioning the facts."

But Bauder reports that "critics suggest Klein is parsing words, that even raising the issue lends it credence"--such criticism even coming from "the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes: It 'explains their upcoming documentary: "The World: Flat. We Report—You Decide."'"

AlterNet's Liliana Segura has traced (7/28/09) the "nasty little rumor" that "Barack Hussein Obama is not a legitimate president because he is not really an American citizen" from "the early days of the presidential race" to its current status as "a full-blown conspiracy theory" that does "nonetheless enjoy increasingly high-profile political support, and media coverage '9/11 truthers' could only dream of":

Last week the "birthers" became big news again, after a video emerged showing Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., confronted at a town hall meeting by a woman who angrily accused him of being complicit in the coverup of Obama's true origins. Castle, who is commonly labeled a "moderate Republican"... seemed genuinely perplexed.

"Well, I don't know what comment that invites," he said, to a chorus of boos. "If you're referring to the president, then he is a citizen of the United States."

The video of Castle's unfortunate run-in with the birthers hit YouTube and went viral. MSNBC put the clip on heavy rotation; Hardball host Chris Matthews devoted multiple segments to the topic; on CNN and on his radio show, sneering nativist Lou Dobbs fanned the flames with such remarks as, "What is the deal here? I'm starting to think we have … a document issue," and on Larry King, Dick Cheney's increasingly vocal daughter, Liz, shared her highly unempirical view that "one of the reasons you see people so concerned about this" is that "people are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever … a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas."

Note how all the airtime given to these crackpots comes despite the fact that, in Segura words, the "conspiracy theory--which holds that Obama was born in Kenya, despite all evidence to the contrary--has long been debunked. The Obama camp released a copy of his birth certificate as early as June 2008, although that only seemed to fan the flames."